all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again

Yesterday, I happened to watch both Disney’s Peter Pan with my preschoolers and SciFi’s Battlestar Galactica Razor with my husband. And I realized that the films are oddly related.

At the beginning of the Peter Pan movie, the narrator states, “All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.”

It’s a line that comes up in Battlestar Galactica again and again. In the Razor movie, a Cylon hybrid (possibly a god?) said it to Kendra Shaw before she blew them up. And other characters (Leoben, Six, and Roslin) have said it or paraphrased it, according to one fansite, Sacred Scrolls - Battlestar Wiki.

And the Peter Pan Wikipedia entry has this note:

Ronald D. Moore, one of the executive producers and developer of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, has cited this film as the inspiration for one of the recurring themes of the T.V. series concerning the cyclical nature of time. The first line of the film, “All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again,” has been featured prominently in the Battlestar Galactica series as a piece of scripture often repeated by characters.

In J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan The Original Story, the prose opening is “All children, except one, grow up.” All children who live, that is; every family I know has lost a child in the last few generations. And all children who are not autistic or otherwise developmentally retarded. And all who are not Cylons, born and resurrected fully grown.

I like the film opening line better. And I like the way it manifests in Battlestar Galactica. It signifies how most of us go through the same stages, finding and losing a sense of magic, dreaming the same archetypes from our collective unconscious, working our way through a spiraling cycle of time throughout history.